Outsourcing Consulting News
Case Study: Development of Hotel Management Reports
Customer
The project was done for Intercontinental Hotels Group, the largest hotel company by number of rooms, with 620,000 rooms in over 100 countries around the world. It operates a diverse portfolio of brands across multiple economic segments, including Intercontinental Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts, Holiday Inn, and Holiday Inn Express.
Business Case
The client needed a set of reports developed and integrated into their solution to support the Hotel Life Cycle process, analyze and verify hotel status and provide well-presented and accurate statistical and financial information to internal staff and partners as well as to clients.
One of the objectives of outsourcing the development was to reduce time-to-market availability of the reports while in-house IT team was lacking resources for such development due to being involved in other development and maintenance tasks.
Solution
SoloSoft assumed responsibility for the report development, verification and simplification of integration process. The ease of integration was crucial since the reports had to be integrated into several similar systems running in the client's environment and storing data in separate different though similar databases. The following are the key aspects of the report development SoloSoft team had to consider:
Use of Jasper Reports for reports development.
Keep modularity of reports by constructing each report as a set of sub-reports which can be re-used in the requested reports as well as in potential future reports.
Flexible data container layer allowing easy integration into various systems.
Unified reports code base with minimal to none code duplication for easy maintenance and maximum extendability.
Complete documentation of the reports source code, architecture and class hierarchy.
Robust data validation, correct handling of blank data and data in unsupported formats.
Consistent report template alignment regardless of supplied data.
Implementation of certain chart elements not supported natively by Jasper reports required custom drawing mechanisms implementation.
All reports had to be easily combined into a single report.
The reports provide financial information so accuracy of all calculations should be flawless.
The reports were shipped to various institutions meaning formatting of all data had to be flawless as well.
The reports should support deployment to Windows, Linux and Unix environments.
Deployment of reports to production had a hard deadline so any delays with deliverables were unacceptable.
Development of reports had to have precise planning since it was thoroughly monitored.
Our team provided development, testing and support for the reports and shipped all deliverables in time, including compiled reports, complete source code along with development and support documentation.
SoloSoft provided the personnel and project management to maintain and support the mission-critical development and shipment.
Technologies
J2EE, Hibernate, EJB, HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, Jasper reports, JBoss, Oracle 11, Eclipse, Jaspersoft iReport, Ant.